by Chuck Dixon
“We’re both in bad shape.” He took her wrists to look at her hands. They were raw and bleeding.
“Yeah. Wasn’t it you who told me never to volunteer?” Caroline winced as he pulled a long splinter from her palm. She hadn’t even noticed it.
“Not me. I’m the dope who raises his hand every time. The shit hits the fan, and I’m your man.” He pulled her against him as he lowered his back to the deck.
“Big dope,” she said and rested her head against him, his hand brushing her hair from her brow.
They were both asleep even before they closed their eyes.
50
No Mercy
THE MORNING SUN touched the lip of the crater, then descended down the west wall, drawing back the black shadows like a curtain to reveal the aftermath of the night’s battle.
Bloated corpses covered with feeding sea birds lay among the rocks or drifted in the shallows. The bottom of the crater was befogged with smoke from the smoldering wreck of the trireme lying on its side like flotsam along one wall of the gap that led out to the channel. The other trireme sat low in the water with its hull holed by the rocks it struck the night before. Most of the crew worked to bail the rising water from the bilge while others threw any non-essential cargo overboard to lighten the load.
The Lion sat at anchor. Most of its company lay where they had dropped the night before. The deck was littered with snoring men sound asleep by others who had died of wounds in the night or been dispatched with a blade across the throat to end their suffering. Below decks, the oarsmen lay atop their benches or draped over the barrels of stowed oars. Clouds of flies gathered above the sticky reservoir of blood that blackened the deck forward of the mast.
The tireless Ahinadab ordered about a skeleton watch armed with spears to discourage any from either ship who might have ideas about boarding the Lion. They walked the deck with oil lamps to illuminate the water about them. They lanced a few pitiful survivors who managed to climb the hull and listened to the wheedling cries for mercy from others. Those men tired long before dawn light and either sank in the black water or swam for their grounded sister ship.
The captain kept a wary eye on the beached Carthaginians. For the moment, the men aboard the wolf’s head trireme were consumed with their own troubles. They made no aggressive move toward the Lion. There were barques visible aboard the tilted deck that could be rowed over to assault the Phoenician craft. They remained secured with lines to the tilted deck.
The full company of the Lion woke as the sunlight crossed the decks. They were put to work washing the decks clear of the stinking remains of the night before. Limbs, fingers, heads, and piles of unidentifiable human tripe were tossed overboard. Buckets of seawater were tossed on the boards to wash the blood, shit, piss, and teeth out through the scuppers. The Lion was streaked with dark stripes of crimson as though it were dying of many wounds.
The few baskets of edibles that were not sacrificed to lighten the hold were rationed out under the watchful eye of Xin. He leaned on his ax and judged each meager portion of dried fish, onions, dates, and nuts scooped into the cupped hands of the hungry crewmen. Their bowls were thrown into the sea during the chase. Each man was allowed a mouthful of water from the skins kept under guard where they were slung from the tiller deck. There was grumbling. But each man knew that supplies were tight, and they had a long way to travel before they reached a welcoming port. If the gods and the seas were not favorable, they would starve before making landfall again.
Dwayne and Caroline awoke with every muscle sore and heads pounding from dehydration. They drank their portion of brackish water and took their ration. They sat with backs to the freeboard and chewed slowly.
“I’d do last night all over again for some McDonald’s,” Dwayne said.
Praxus crouched down by them, licking fish oil from his fingers. He’d stripped off his filthy singlet and was buck naked. Caroline turned away, pretending interest in a gull that landed on the deck to pick up a length of stringy tissue it found lying there.
“Your clothing stinks of feces. You should remove them.” He wrinkled his nose.
“Do you still think we are spies?” Caroline asked, ignoring him.
“I suppose not,” he said.
“What will happen now?” she asked. “We will depart with the tide.”
“I mean, what of us?” Caroline touched a hand to Dwayne’s arm.
“You will be sold. Nothing has changed.” He turned to walk away from them.
“I can’t believe we’re here because of something that little snot wrote,” she said.
“Look hard enough, and there’s an asshole behind every mission,” Dwayne said.
The bowl of the sleeping volcano began to fill again as the sun crossed the sky to sink in the west. The Lion prepared for departure. A chain of men was formed to bail out the bilge. A crew went below to caulk with cloth hammered in place using wedges those places where the cedar planks parted. The ship was seaworthy enough to see them clear of the crater and the twisting channel beyond. These ships were built stout to take punishment. With the truss line restored in place, the Lion’s keel held true. The cedar hull-planks settled back in place. The tenons secured themselves in their mortices. The bireme was scarred but whole.
The oarsmen dipped blistered hands into an amphora of lanolin to sooth their torn skin. They sat at their benches and ran out the oars.
A voice hailed the Lion. The main deck crew lined the freeboards to watch a barque rowing to them from the beached trireme. A dozen men pulled oars. A man stood in the boat, calling from cupped hands in a basso voice. He was black-bearded and wore a helmet trimmed in gold that caught the sunlight, throwing off a glare that reflected off the water. A chest plate of silver-embossed bronze could be seen beneath a cloak of white ostrich feathers. He looked equal parts splendid and ridiculous standing in the bobbing rowboat.
Ahinadab leaned on the railing and held a hand up. He roared a warning. The rowers on the barque lifted their oars from the water. The squat boat rose and fell on the swells that lapped the Lion’s hull.
Praxus translated the exchange for Caroline and Dwayne.
“You will come no further,” Ahinadab called.
“I am Yaroah Melqart, second master of the Wolf of the Sea,” the man in military finery shouted in his rich baritone.
“Second master? Is your captain hiding somewhere on your shitty boat?”
“He is dead. He fell on his sword in shame at being brought low by you thieves.”
“Thieves, are we? You would admit you were outfought by mere thieves? Or will you return to Hamilcar and tell him you faced a mighty armada rather than be thought cowards and women?”
“We seek an accord, a truce,” Melqart called back, ignoring the insults.
“And you will get shit!” Ahinadab shouted. The crew laughed and catcalled at that. A few boys repeated the captain’s words in mock baritone to the amusement of others.
“We pray to the same gods. We sail the same waters. We live beneath the same sun. Our ship is done, its keel broken. Will you not show us mercy?”
“And were it I up to my balls in water and you standing on a firm deck? Would the names of the gods in my prayers matter then?”
The man standing in the boat said nothing in reply. “As I thought,” Ahinadab said. “Ba’al rot you and fuck you, man of Carthage. I will show you no mercy. I will show you only my ass as I depart.”
The crew of the Lion stamped the deck in merriment and called after the barque as the tillerman reversed course and it made its way back to its stranded ship.
The tide began to fill the inlet as evening fell. The water lifted the bireme and gave it steerage way about the rocks. The rowing boss called a slow cadence like a dirge. The oars dipped and rose almost leisurely and picked up only when the incoming current built to make a bow wave around the naked prow. The Lion made its way past the scorched wreck of the hawk-prowed ship and into the channel. To their stern, shadows crep
t up the eastern wall of the crater to cover the wolf’s head trireme as though with a funeral shroud.
51
The Gods Smile, the Gods Laugh
THE LION FOUGHT the current around the turn in the channel, making the angle far more slowly and much more cautiously than before. In the twilight, the nature of the turn was visible. Dwayne was glad he couldn’t see a thing when they’d entered the bend ahead of the chasing vessels. The clearances were razor-thin to either side. He heard the blades of the oars scrape rock more than once.
Dwayne judged the angle of the curve at close to ninety degrees with the channel narrowing on approach. His new appreciation of Ahinadab’s sailing skills rose a few notches. It was nothing short of a miracle that they made it through this twisting notch at the speed they were moving and in near total darkness the night before.
The channel broadened beyond the turn to the wider portion he recalled from the first passage. The current weakened here, and their progress picked up.
Dwayne turned to look up at a shout from above. That same boy sat hugging the mast from a precarious perch on cleats near the top. Had he been there as they made that turn? Dwayne hadn’t thought to look up. The boy was calling and pointing to the shoreline off to starboard. Dwayne strained his eyes but could see nothing. Others in the crew joined him at the freeboard. A few shouted excitedly and gestured ashore.
Ahinadab shouted to the helm. Yada responded by changing their course to bring them closer into the shore. The oars were drawn inboard. Naked swimmers plunged into the water and swam for the beach. Two of the men looped ends of lines around their waists and knotted them fast before jumping into the foam. Others on board played out the ropes which were secured to the anchor hawsers fore and aft.
Dwayne’s curiosity got the best of him. He jumped in, to swim after them. His muscles ached, but the water felt good on his skin even though the salt caused his wounds to sting. He followed the splashes of the others at an angle across the current toward the unseen shore.
He staggered from the water to find the others had all beaten him to the sandy beach at the base of the rock wall. The two men who swam with ropes were directing others to draw them taut and wrap the ends around jagged spires of rock that jutted from the gentle breakers like fangs. The Lion’s anchors were gone, victims of the chase. These lines and the work of Yada at the rudder would serve to hold the bireme steady in the middle of the current.
The lines fast, the swimmers made their way along the beach with Dwayne following. Lying on the white sand was a large humped shape visible in the gloom. It was a sail folded and weighted down with rocks to cover over, like a tarp, a heap of something. Dwayne helped shove the rocks away and joined the men heaving the heavy sailcloth aside.
Beneath the cover lay baskets and amphora and sacks and jars. It was stowage dropped here by the Carthaginians the night before to lighten their ships for the shallow passage into the narrow channel. They anticipated returning this way to retrieve their goods.
The men of the Lion let out a whoop. Here was wine, beer, oil, dried fruit, dried fish, nuts, and grain for bread. There were bolts of cloth, coils of rope, cups, and bowls of brass and lengths of timber. Partly buried in the sand were two long spars banded with bronze and fitted with runnels for sail lines. The sailors were dreading a long, hungry passage with no wind to power them or water to slake their thirst. This trove of edibles and gear changed that equation for them. Some dropped to their knees to shout praise to Ba’al and any other god they could think of. Others knocked the top from an amphora and held it up to spill sweet wine in their mouths.
A crewman cupped his hands and called to the bireme bobbing atop the swells in the dying light. An answering call was unmistakably Ahinadab’s bellow. The men made their way back to where they secured the lines to the rock spires. Dwayne stood in the rolling surf and listened to the sounds of hammering coming from the Lion. The others sat on the sand and shared a basket of sand packed apples and rich red wine. Dwayne munched a few apples but recalled what Caroline told him about the ancients using lead to sweeten wine and satisfied his thirst with fresh water from a clay jar.
Xin’s booming voice reached them over the rush of the current. The men jumped from the sand to wade out to where the aft anchor line was tied fast about the rock. Dwayne squinted into the night. He could hear the voices of men growing closer to the shore. The crewman standing with him took hold of the line and struggled to pull the slack from it. Dwayne lent a hand and heaved. A new raft emerged from the shadows with Xin aboard and crewmen standing and pulling on the anchor line to draw them inshore.
The raft, hastily constructed from boards pulled from the deck of the Lion, was hauled to the shallows and held in place by a line secured about a stake driven into the sand. Xin directed the men to the cache of goods and the loading began.
Most of the night was taken up with transferring all of the Carthaginian baggage onboard. It took twenty trips. The spars were floated across, guided by the strongest swimmers, while men aboard the Lion hauled them closer on the new cordage found in the cache. All were exhausted from the chase and the battle, but this gift from the gods buoyed their spirits and they sang as they labored.
The current stilled at first and then began backing as the sky above turned purple, then pink. The tide was retreating, and the bireme must follow or risk grounding. The last of the goods were stowed below, and the raft hauled aboard to be knocked down and its timbers restored to the Lion’s decking.
Caroline greeted Dwayne as he climbed over the gunwale. He was surprised to see her in clean—relatively clean—clothes. She wore a singlet that reached her knees under a loose-fitting tunic belted at the waist with a triple loop of cord held in place by a bronze clasp. Her girl parts were still well hidden, but now her skin was washed clean. Her hair was a salt-caked mop but no longer plastered with muck.
“How the hell did you manage that?” he asked as she gripped his arm to help him aboard.
“Everyone was so preoccupied with the goodies that no one noticed me grab some clothes from the stack. They were like kids on Christmas morning. I changed in the hold.”
“How’d you get clean?”
“I took a bucket of seawater down with me. I feel a thousand percent better, but I’d still murder someone for a hot shower with soap.”
“That was a big risk, Caroline,” he said.
“And who jumped overboard to go swimming with the pirates?” She squinted, at him, head tilted.
“Any clothes left for me?” he said. His swim trunks were in soiled tatters. He looked like what he was—an extra in a gladiator movie.
“I think you’ll have to wait until we get to a big and tall shop.”
THE LION REACHED open sea by mid-morning and set course due north, leaving the volcanic island behind them with all oars working. When they were well clear, Ahinadab stood by the mast and called to the crew to gather about. Dwayne and Caroline stood on the raised portion of the prow where they could watch what was happening. Praxus joined them. He too had changed clothes and now wore a white woolen tunic and skirt of red linen. His eyes were wavering, and his young face was deeply lined with fear.
“What is happening?” Caroline asked.
“My master. Ahinadab calls for him. This is not good.”
Echephron, the hunched old seer, was hauled up from below deck. His clothing was black with filth from hiding deep in the bowels of the hold throughout the battle. His hair hung in sodden tangles. His eyes spun in their sockets and he protested bitterly. He was thrown to the boards at the captain’s feet. Xin came through the circle of men, grasping his ax.
“Ahinadab is unhappy with him,” Praxus said.
“I can see that with my own eyes,” Caroline answered.
“The master’s reading of the portents was wrong. He dashed their hopes on the rocks of despair.” Praxus translated Ahinadab’s words, but Caroline suspected that the natural storyteller in him was making the boy embellish a bit.
“He assures the captain that it was only a mistake. He says that the omens he found within the bird’s innards were for their enemies. That bird was meant to land on their deck rather than the Lion of Ba’al.”
The old bastard was throwing his slave Praxus under the bus. Ahinadab wasn’t buying it. He sneered at the shivering seer and flicked fingers at him in a dismissive gesture.
“Of what use is a seer that cannot see? What use is a reader of portents who cannot read?” Praxus relayed with voice breaking. “You cannot pull an oar. You cannot tie a line. You are only a mouth to feed and an ass to shit.”
The old man screeched and gestured while making a sad attempt to rise from his knees. Praxus did not translate. He only lowered his eyes and muttered a prayer. Ahinadab nodded, and Xin stepped to the gibbering ancient and lifted the ax. Caroline made an involuntary sound and turned away.
Dwayne expected a clean beheading. What followed was butcher’s work as Xin hacked the old man to death with six or more blows delivered with indifference. The keening shrieks from the victim ceased after the fourth chop. What was once an oracle touched by the gods now lay quartered on the deck in a spreading smear of blood, less than the remains of an animal. Xin flicked his ax and sent an arc of blood skyward. He snarled an order and boys gathered up the bits and tossed them to the sea.
Xin added something that made the crew hoot with laughter.
“The old bugger’s back is straight now,” Praxus translated for Caroline.
Ahinadab then gestured to the standing men who broke up to go to their assigned tasks or to return to watchful idleness.
Praxus sank to the deck, limp and shaking. Caroline crouched by him.
